It was a pretty decent Olympics for Team SA, bringing home 10 medals and generally giving a good showing over in Rio.

Those 10 medals included Wayde’s record 400 metre effort, as well as Caster showing the rest of the world that their hatefully misinformed views weren’t going to stop her making history.

Yesterday some of the athletes arrived back at OR Tambo airport to great fanfare, and of course Fikile Mbalula was there to lap up the attention and pose for photo opportunities.

As if we didn’t see enough of him every five minutes of the Bok match against Argentina – we get it, he’s at the stadium.

Also at the airport were some members of the South African Sports Confederation and Olympic Committee (SASCOC), although they aren’t all that popular with some of our athletes.

First there’s Wayde van Niekerk, who was reprimanded by SASCOC CEO Tubby Reddy after posing with All Blacks rugby star Sonny Bill Williams.

Here’s the tweet from Sonny Bill:

And here’s Sport24 with why that photo above is a problem:

Reddy was “furious” after seeing Van Niekerk had posed in the picture with the logo of his sponsors, adidas, emblazoned on his shirt.

“Tubby had harsh words with him and ordered him to remove the photo off Twitter,” one of Van Niekerk’s team-mates said.

“He (Van Niekerk) was not fazed and refused.

Wayde then sent this tweet, which basically says SASCOC’s organising has been a shambles:

That kit would be those awful, oversized tracksuits that look like hand me downs from Penny Heyns at the 1996 Olympics. Seriously, is that the best we could muster, and only manage to hand over the night of the opening ceremony?

Anyway that’s just the tip of the iceberg, because javelin silver medallist Sunette Viljoen wasn’t beating about the bush. She has long been a critic of the way SA treats the athletes who represent the country, and she was in fine form yesterday.

First of all she claims she hasn’t been paid since February for her involvement in SASCOC’s Operation Excellence (OPEX) programme, which really isn’t hard to believe.

But the real juicy bits came straight from Twitter, where she took fire with a series of tweets and retweets:

Well no, she wasn’t actually done because some of the best was still to come.

Then fellow Olympian Bridgitte Hartley waded in, making it clear that she too was forced to tailor her pyjama tracksuit so that she could wear it during the Olympics.

The ball had well and truly started rolling, because next in line was Roeland Schoeman:

We’ll end with something from perennial pot stirrer Graeme Joffe, the journalist forced to flee to the U.S. after fearing for his life (HERE). The gist here is our failure to look after our national hockey teams, and how Great Britain have trumped us on that front:

10 medals sounds grand, and cheering on our athletes was pretty darn fun, but we’re fooling ourselves if we think that our medal haul is a job well done.

Alas we are unlikely to see heads roll any time soon, given that SASCOC has been rotten for years now and never been held accountable.

[sources:sport24&sport24]